Reputation Farming: Cenarion Circle and Sporeggar

23Jul

Over the weekend I decided that, once again, I wanted to change up Lexington’s (BElf Paladin 74) professions. With his enchanting quite close to being maxed, I had no desire to drop it from how much it costs to get it leveled up, nor for the time I spent farming various enchanting recipes around the world. But his herbalism was not doing much for me.

So I dropped Herbalism and replaced it with Tailoring. I know what you’re thinking here, “Tailoring!? On a Paladin!?!?!?” Yeah, you heard me. My plate-wearing, mob-pwning, king of AoE grinding likes to knit. You got a problem with that? Huh? HUH!? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Why Tailoring?
Tailoring isn’t generally associated with Paladins, though I do know at least one other that does it, but you have to remember that I’m not big on end game material, so I don’t really care about getting the most out of whatever profession I choose to take. I take professions based on what I want to do with them. I already have a tailor in this server, but he’s only level 20 and so his profession is currently level-maxed at 225 for another 15 levels.

The main reason why I chose Tailoring was for Herbalism and Enchanting bags, with a side benefit of making my own regular bags for my various alts and, of course, the members of our Twitter-guild, MOTiE.

Most regular bags can be purchased for a fairly low price on the Auction House, with even the 20-slot Frostweave bags selling for around 100g (68-90g on my server). Even the majority of the profession bags sell for less than that, with a few exceptions here and there and one very notable exception: herbalism.

The 32-slot herb bag sells for 800-1,000g on my server, and since I still have 2 more characters who have herbalism as one of their professions, bag space is always a problem for them because I don’t want to spend that much gold on a bag. Even the 28-slot herb bag sells for 225-275g on my server, and that too is far more than I want to pay for a bag. When I can buy regular 20-slot bags that can hold anything at all for 1/3 of the price, I hate to pay that much for only 8 extra slots and have all of them forced to carry only herbs.

There’s Gold In Them There Bags
So, on the one side I am now able to make my own herb bags (20, 24, or 28 slots right now) instead of spending large amounts of gold, and on the other there is quite a bit of gold to be made if I decide to sell the herb bags myself. Enchanting bags do not sell as high as herb bags do, and while having the large bags would save me some room I am able to get by with the 20-slot enchanting bags purchased from vendors in Hellfire Peninsula.

There are two reasons, as far as I can figure, why these herb bags cost so much. First, none of these bag patterns can simply be picked up at your trainer, none of them are sold at regular vendors, none of them drop off of mobs, and none can be sold on the Auction House. There is only one way to get the patterns to make these bags, and that is by grinding for Reputation.

Here are some tables to show the specifics of the different bag types. Herb Bag values are based on what I see on my server. Enchanting bags are based on what I see on wowhead.com since I never see them for sale on my server’s AH. I compared the prices of the two types of bags on wowhead and they come out pretty close, with herb bags about 20% more expensive, so values might be comparable.

You can see from the Reputation columns that all but one Enchanting Bag pattern can be bought from regular vendors without required reputation, while all Herbalism Bag patterns require reputation.

Reputation Farming: Cenarion CircleCenarion Circle reputation is not too hard to come by. It might take you some time because the reputation rewards are not as high as some others, but there are so many mobs running around that you get it from that it keeps you engaged through most of the process.

There are several ways to get the reputation, but all of them basically come down to grinding mobs. I did all of my grinding with my Paladin’s Prot/Ret spec (he’s dual spec Prot-Ret/Prot-Holy right now), but I was not able to do a lot of AoE grinding here because many of the mobs are spell casters and because of that are harder to gather into groups for AoE. If I had a Ret spec available to me at the time, I probably would have gone ahead and switched to it just because it would have been faster. Overall though, it was not too bad.

Almost all of the Twilight Cultist mobs in Silithus will give you 10 Reputation when you kill them, and those cultists also drop the items that you need in order to build your reputation. There are several different types of Twilight Cultist mobs, but all of them are humanoids and all of them have “Twilight” in their name. If its name has Twilight in it, kill it.

According to my research online, you can purchase all of the items you need from the Auction House. You cannot be sure that the items will be available though, nor do you have any control over the prices. If the items are cheap, and you would like to go that route, then by all means do it. Personally, I enjoyed grinding for the items and the rep myself. And since killing the mobs that drop the items gives you reputation by itself, you will probably do better this way regardless.

The Twilight Cultist Cowl/Mantle/Robe are all required to obtain the Abyssal Crests. By equipping each of these three items you can activate stones at the different Twilight Camps that will summon mobs for you to fight. Those mobs will drop the Abyssal Crests, as well as various other items (mostly trash), including the occasional Encrypted Twilight Text.

Each time you use the Cowl/Mantle/Robe to summon the mobs though, they are destroyed. When the mobs are summoned, you have a few seconds before they actually agro you and attack. Be sure to re-equip the items that you took off before these fights begin.

You can find all of the Cultist gear at the three camps around the map (see the map for Twilight Lord Everun below), but there is a fourth camp that’s in the north/north-east corner which has a cave entrance as well. Inside that cave is the only place that you can find a type of cultist called Twilight Flamereavers, which have some of the best potential (i.e. low % chance) drops of all the mobs, and they too drop the texts and occasional cowl/mantle/robe. I mention the Flamereavers in particular because they are the only mob that you can grind for reputation after you reach Revered reputation. So if you want to continue to grind rep all the way to Exalted, then that is where you should focus. The Flamereavers are also the best mobs to target for AoE grinding.

The camp near where the Flamereavers are found is also the best location I found for farming the Cowl/Mantle/Robe, though you can find all of these items at each camp. Apparently everyone has different luck with different items, in different locations when farming here, so just keep moving around from camp to camp as needed.

In addition to getting reputation for turning in the Crests though, you also receive a Bag of Spoils which contains all sorts of little goodies for you. Some of which sale rather well on the Auction House.

The Encrypted Texts can drop from all of the Twilight Cultists, so while you are gaining reputation just from killing them, you also have a chance to pick up the texts to get more reputation. The best source of Encrypted Texts though is a special mob called the Twilight Prophet, who drops 7-10 of the texts at a time instead of just 1 like all of the others. The prophets roam around the map and have fairly slow respawn rates, so while you should keep an eye out for them, don’t plan on farming only the prophets. The prophet is always escorted by two melee-mobs as well.

Here is a map of the Twilight Prophet’s patrol paths, courtesy of wowhead.com:

There is also a Rare spawn that wanders around the various Cultist camps named Twilight Lord Everun who has a chance to drop a few cards for various decks, and also an epic two handed axe called Brain Hacker, which he dropped for me the second time I killed him. I am not sure offhand what his respawn time is, but during the time it took me to grind the reputation I needed I killed him 3 times.

Here is a map of where Twilight Lord Everun happens to spawn, and since he patrols all three of the camps, it also shows you the location of the camps for you to farm them.

I did not keep track of how many mobs I had to kill, how many texts or crests I turned in, or how many of the various other quests in the zone that I completed along with the rest, but all in all it took me 3-4 hours to grind from Neutral to Revered. There are other rewards I could get for continuing to grind rep higher, but none of them are ones that I would particularly use. In some cases there are tabards, vanity pets, or even mounts. Overall the mounts are the only ones that appeal to me at all, but they are also quite the gold sink, and gold is one resource that I don’t bother farming very often though I probably should. So rather than becoming exalted with everyone, I simple reach the level I need for the item(s) I want and then hit the road.

Reputation Farming: Sporeggar
Farming reputation in Sporeggar is easy, but even more time consuming than Cenarion Circle. I had already farmed Sporeggar rep with my Paladin several weeks ago in order to get the Petrified Lichen Guard shield for my AoE grinding, so I did not have to start this one from scratch. Instead, I just had to bump it up to Revered in order to get the 28-slot herb bag.

Farming rep with Sporeggar is pretty easy when you start out because there are so many mobs that give you rep for killing them, and so many items that can be turned in for rep. As you move up the ranks though, the number of sources dwindles a lot. At the Honored stage, where I started this time, there is only one mob that gives you reputation (15 rep each), but they are so few and so spread apart that they aren’t really worth the grind.

However, there are two very solid sources of reputation at this level, one from farming and the other from grinding.

To grind for rep, you want to accept the repeatable quest called Now That We’re Friends…, which has you kill 18 Nagas, 12 of which are melee, and 6 casters. The mobs are north and slightly-east of your quest giver and they do not take long to grind. Turning in the quest grants you 750 Reputation and can be repeated as often as you like. The drops from these mobs are not that great, and they are occasionally annoying to fight with the mobs calling adds and fleeing when their health is low and so forth, but it’s not a big deal.

Map

To farm for rep, you need to head to the Underbog instance in the north-central portion of the map. The target of your farming is Sanguine Hibiscus, which can be picked up in the instance, or dropped from the mobs inside. This “herb” is turned in for the Bring Me A Shrubbery! quest, that rewards 750 Reputation for every 5x Sanguine Hibiscus you turn in. The fastest, and easiest way to get it is to just clear out all of the mobs in the area around where you enter and just roam around picking it up as it respawns. Most of it is found in that area anyway, and the respawn timer on them isn’t all that long (though I didn’t think to time it).

The item looks similar to a red herb that has a bit of a glow to it. If you have Herbalism then it will show up on your map, but you do not have to be an herbalist to pick them. You can also buy these off of the auction house if you don’t want to spend the time farming or doing the repeat grinding quest.

The first time I went into Underbog I did a solo full clear of the instance because I picked up a couple of quests to come inside as well, and wanted to see what mats I could get from disenchanting the boss drops. I was not overly impressed with that though, so I just stuck to farming the herbs near the entrance the other few times I came. I killed all of the mobs in the initial area before having to go up to the ramp, farmed all of the herb I could find, ran up and killed the first boss, and then ran back down to farm the herb again. I then ran back up to the first boss’s area and back down for a final check of respawned herbs, and then left the instance to do another 1-2 runs of Now That We’re Friends… for more rep. Then back to Underbog, back to the grind quest twice, back to Underbog, etc.

I spent about 2 hours farming all of the reputation I needed from Sporeggar to get the pattern for the 28-slot herb bag, though again, I did not start at Neutral this time since I had already farmed rep previously.

Also, take note of the fact that you do not use gold to purchase any of the reputation items from Sporeggar rep. Everything is paid for with Glowcaps. The bag itself takes 25 glowcaps, so make sure you farm glowcaps from the Zangarmarsh zone as well. You can find them all over the place. I know that before 3.1 came out you could track Glowcaps with Herbalism, but I believe that was changed in 3.1. Regardless, it’s not that hard to find them, and they are in reasonably high supply.

7 responses to “Reputation Farming: Cenarion Circle and Sporeggar”

I need to go grind the CE rep on my tailor as well. (As tweeted, I have the Sporeggar rep at Exalted for the pet.) I spent so much time in Silithus back in the day on my druid that I have tended to avoid it on the alts. Come the next expansion, your tailoring/enchanting combo will work well together since you will make yourself DEables as you level tailoring, which boosts things along pretty quickly.

Thanks for the link in your blog. Rep grinding is a bit new to me since I’m usually not one to care a whole lot about that sort of thing, but I had a lot of fun with these. Even though everything was under my level and rather easy I enjoyed the time spent.

Having already leveled a tailor to 450 without having an enchanter, I know that working the two separately is very costly. Constantly buying Infinite Dust for items that may, or may not, sell on the AH for a profit really sucked, and was ultimately responsible for me dropping tailoring on my mage. If I didn’t have to spend all that time and money to level it up and make the items then I might have stuck with it, but that wasn’t the case.

I got all the glowcaps for the pet and intended to get it, but I thought it was Revered instead of Exalted. But the time I finished I was ready to just call it a night. I kept the glowcaps needed to buy the pet, but I don’t plan on getting that rep for a while, if ever. I like the idea of having a lot of pets, but at the same time I don’t like putting time/effort into something that really doesn’t do anything for me at all. If the pet was BoA and I could send it around to my other toons, then I’d do it right away, but since it’s not – /shrug.

I…have a vanity pet problem. I blame my BF. When I started playing 3 1/2 years ago he gave me an owl pet, after which I became obsessed with the darn things. My druid got her lil’game hunter a few weeks back thanks to argent tourney pets, and my SP has gotten her Stinker.

Well there’s certainly nothing wrong with having a pet problem, Candy. It’s insanely common, actually. If there was more you could do as far as interacting with them or something, then I might be able to get into them from an RP perspective, but since most of them just do nothing but follow you around it’s a little annoying to me (personally).

I do occasionally throw a pet out there and let them run around with me just for the sake of doing it, but not all that often.

Since I have never had an 80, or any other level-capped character, I have never fought with a rep-grind. Hopefully, I won’t have to. Wonder if an 80 Afflock can farm a little faster (since caster’s aren’t as much of an issue (using ranged spells on them, of course)

A DPS class/build of any kind would do better than the Prot pally in this specific case. Not that the prot pally was bad, he just couldn’t do what he excels at.

Basically any dps could own CC rep with ease. And you don’t have to be anywhere close to 80 to do rep grinds. If you want a specific reward granted only via rep, then you just go for it at whatever level you can handle the grind.

And the vast majority of rep grinds are completely unnecessary. The only ones that really come close are ones such as Sons of Hodir which has shoulder enchants. That’s the only way for a non-Inscriptionist to get decent shoulder enchants for end game.